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The more things stay the same …

The more they change …

In the previous post I vented a bit about how Microsoft was starting to seriously eat Apple’s lunch

I have used the same shared hosting service for over ten years now, and while they are amazing people and always have gone above and beyond for me … I needed to move this site to a virtual server. I spent the better part of last weekend looking at a ton of options, but in the end Amazon Web Service’s LightSail won me over.

This site (nor most personal websites) do not need a ton of horsepower, but I did need some flexibility that for security and performance reasons just could not be done on a shared host. LightSail was a breeze (punny?)! for under $100/year I have a dedicated Ubuntu instance, 1TB/mo of transfers and full control to completely screw things up should I choose to do something outstandingly stupid 🙂

If you are reading this, then my DNS changes have kicked in and propagated to your DNS resolver.



Moving was pretty straight forward:

  • Built a base Ubuntu VM using Amazon’s Ubuntu image
  • Installed a bunch of crap I needed (apt-get is your friend)
  • Set up my Apache Virtual Hosts (screwed a few things up & fixed them in the process)
    • Read and RE-READ too many pages of Apache configuration docs … its been a LONG time
  • SSH‘d into shell at my previous host
  • used mysqldump to backup the MySQL database
  • Tar and BZip’d my web directory
  • moved backups to the new server
  • Restored the MySQL file into MariaDB
    • And yes there are good reasons and no downsides to switching from MySQL
  • Unzipped the files, checked, rechecked and fixed (a few times) the permissions and ownership of the files/directories
  • Updated DNS to point www.hoke.org and hoke.org to the new AWS hosted machine

Viola! 

Well… I hope so. The purpose of this post is to make sure everything is working right after all that 🙂

Still left to do … Once DNS fully propagates I have to register www.hoke.org for a https certificate with LetsEncrypt… as well as figure out if I can have a LetsEncrypt certificate work for both www.hoke.org and hoke.org … back to the docs (worst case is I have to redirect one to the other …)

Stay Tuned …

[Update] So I had some downtime at the hotel … TLS is enabled, LetsEncrypt Certbot FTW

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